If Republicans are looking for a long-range strategy to win back Congress and keep the White House, Harvard Business Review (February) identifies one option: more Republican children.

“People who are social, religious or political conservatives tend to have more children, and that fact has profound implications for culture, for politics and for business,” Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation writes in HBR. “In the United States, fertility rates are 12 percent higher in states that voted for George W. Bush in the most recent presidential election than in the more liberal states that supported John Kerry.”

One consequence of this phenomenon is the emergence of a patriarchal society, which Longman says “is already well under way” in the United States. “Today we see a culture in which social conservatives and the religious-minded play a far greater role than they did 40 years ago,” he adds. Longman’s concept is one of 20 “breakthrough ideas” discussed at length in HBR.

– Cox News Service

Bill collectors’ debt of gratitude

Guess who loves the debt that everybody else hates? Debt collectors, of course.

According to Smart Money (February), probably no group has profited from debt more than debt collectors. “From big agencies to one-man shops, a growing army of collectors is chasing you down for that $1.92 you owe the video store – in some cases even if you have already paid it.”

All told, the number of collection agents has doubled since the early ’90s, and industry revenue has tripled to $15 billion. Last year, agencies recovered nearly $40 billion in debt – or $133 for every man, woman and child in the United States, the magazine reports.

The upshot, says Smart Money, is that consumers are getting tough treatment over debts they had long regarded as minor annoyances. “These days everyone from your lawn care man to part-time eBay entrepreneurs can find a collection agency willing to take their case.”

The most obvious explanation is overspending. “Since 2001, non-mortgage consumer debt grew 26 percent to $2.3 trillion. Meanwhile, investors discovered that debt collection can be profitable in good times and bad,” which helped fuel the growth of the debt-collection industry.

– Cox News Service

Going public is no panacea

Private business owners itching to go public with a stock offering might want to pause a moment and reconsider, according to a Forbes (Feb. 12) report. It seems a new academic study indicates that the profitability of a typical private company declines sharply after an initial public stock offering. Three University of Chicago professors looked at 7,183 initial offerings in the 30 years through 2004, and found that the quarterly return on equity – a measure of company performance – declined by 2.7 percent a year after the IPO and 4.3 percent after three years.

The considered opinion of the researchers was that initial public offerings take place when “expected future profitability is sufficiently high.” But Forbes says that “can be quite different from the actual results down the road.”

– Cox News Service

Book List / Foreign multinationals: America’s next challenge

While he was at the World Bank, Antoine van Agtmael was credited with having invented the term “emerging markets.” He’s been a leading guru ever since. In “The Emerging Markets Century” (Free Press), van Agtmael warns Americans that the next threat to their economic hegemony will come not from U.S. multinationals outsourcing work to developing countries but from the developing world’s home-grown multinationals with extensive networks of customers, suppliers and employees in the United States.

Van Agtmael’s assertions about the inevitability of foreign multinationals’ superiority have the flavor of assuming what he seeks to prove. But there’s no doubt he’s identified the next wave of globalization, which should be of use to investors and policymakers alike.

What: “How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe,” by Thomas Cahill.

Why: “I was in an airport and we were delayed so I went looking for a book.

“Being Irish, the book held interest for me and to read one with such a title made it even better. The theme was that while Europe was falling, most of its accomplishments were being lost by the tribes from the north. The tiny island of Ireland, where no one wanted to go because of the nature of the people who lived there, was a safe haven for the religious monks who wanted to save them. So while the knowledge from all of those centuries was being lost, the monks in Ireland were putting it down in writing to save the world from itself. Through the next century, they brought it back to the mainland of Europe.

“The book is a great read, especially for those who love history, with lots of stories about the people and their culture and some tales of barbarism. If you’re Irish, it helps even more. The style makes for a slower read.”

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